You can't do it all

You can't do it all

Where is Ryan? Where is the manager? Is Ryan there, we hear it all day long or people contact me on personal emails, Facebook, or however they think they can. 

If I answered every request that came in all I would be doing all day and night is putting out fires or talking to salespeople or anyone one else who needs a "minute" I would be a glorified firefighter. The problem is I can put those fires out right away and make things better but that is doing a disservice to the people I personally put in place and trained myself.

I spend countless hours training everyone, we do more training than you would imagine and work day and night 7 days a week sometimes 16 hours a day or more I have gotten to a spot where I planned to not be available for the day to day things. I have put our company in a place where I can oversee and manage, be a CEO and not have to manage daily job sites, client issues, employee issues.

That certainly doesn't mean clients will understand that but that is the way it is if I had to fix every small issue that comes in we wouldn't be able to service the amount of work we do or do the training that we do and honestly it was never my plan to work "in" the business but to work "on" the business.

So yes the calls that come in for me I rarely take, anyone I need to speak with knows how to get a hold of me and it is a select few, guess what I also make mistakes so just by getting a hold of me doesn;t mean everything will be better, remember the answers your getting were trained directly by me to the people in charge who also will make an occasional mistake, we're all human, but you cannot say we are not accountable for ourselves.

You may say, you are the owner and have to do it, no I don't believe that think about all the companies you deal with day in and out and how many of them are you getting the owner on the phone? They work hard to get to a spot where they either have to step back to manage things or want to, you cannot fault someone for that, they place managers in positions to handle all of these things.

So let the people in place do their thing, hold them accountable for what they say and be a great customer

You will not ruin my day

A typical day in the life of a painting company:

A normal day in our office comes with many emotions and they are affected by the people we come across each day.

This could be a typical impatient general contractor, an awesome residential customer calling to give praise or one that is irrational and demanding but what we cannot do is let any of them change how our day goes.

Their emotions are not necessarily ours and letting them change how we act or feel should never happen.

So how do we do this? I will be honest sometimes this is tough but we stay grounded by knowing we have done our best in everything we do, appreciating what is around us whether that is a co-worker who is going above and beyond, our families or any number of things to be grateful for.

Who are the best people I come across? They are real people who appreciate honesty whether that is upsetting or not and understand the work it takes to produce a quality job and is thankful for someone helping them out.

When I come across these people I always make a note in their estimate folder so we all know this one is a gem and we do everything we can for them and more because of people like this travel together and guaranteed they have more friends and family who they can refer you to who have the same personality.

Now on the other hand if we have a difficult, unreasonable and demanding client the same may be said of their friends because if they act like this to us most likely they act like that in all aspects of their lives.

Don't take these people's actions and attitudes personal, in our office, we keep a list of them and reflect back upon them once in awhile, they don't even know they are treating people badly most of the time.

Forget about them and move on, remember the great ones and cultivate those relationships